We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Pure Storage FlashBlade based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"The most valuable features are extremely low latency, high IOPS with VMware, inline deduplication and compression."
"Because we were able to afford to go all flash, we don't manage the tiers, we're not moving data up, and we're not waiting for overnight cycles."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"It is easy to deploy and it's all-flash, so it's very fast."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerMax NVMe is its replication feature."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"The high availability that other systems don't have. In other systems, there is an owner in the storage processes. But for PowerMAX, there is no owner. All the process storage is passed to all nodes without ownership. So, there is no response feature in the storage in PowerMax. In the other systems, there is a response, which is a very nice feature. No systems have such a feature."
"The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"It's faster and more resilient."
"PowerMax, with version 9.02, which we installed recently, has some very good features, such as CloudIQ."
"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."
"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."
"It is very easy to use, and it is very fast."
"The main feature I have found to be product replication."
"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."
"The product is scalable and easy to expand."
"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"I would like to see continued visibility and analytics in the platform."
"Dell needs to offer more midrange storage options with enterprise-class features similar to the PowerMAX."
"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."
"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."
"The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot."
"I believe it would be of great benefit to work on the customization of the pricing structure for different enterprises and their specific needs."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."
"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."
"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."
"The speed could be improved."
"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."
"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."
"It would be beneficial if the layer could support the S3 protocol and be container ready in the next release."
"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
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